Municipal site leasehold in Sweden: A land policy instrument in Decay

Municipal site leasehold in Sweden is in need of renovation. Municipalities are troubled with securing returns on investments and increments in land values, leaseholders by unpredictability and sharply increased fees, and both are troubled by growing numbers of costly court cases. As a result, the use of site leasehold has come to a near standstill. Recent developments in the use of site leasehold in Sweden are charted, problems are highlighted, and possible solutions are discussed by way of comparison with other countries. If municipal site leasehold is to play a meaningful role in Swedish land policy, it must be reformed.     

AMENITIES VERSUS LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES: CHOOSING THE OPTIMAL DISTANCE TO MOVE*

ABSTRACT. A recent debate in the regional economics literature has focused attention on the motivation behind an individual's decision to migrate. Human-capital migration models emphasize labor market disequilibria whereas alternative (hedonic) migration models stress households’altered demand for nontraded goods. In this paper, we test the relative importance of these two possible motivations for moving between metropolitan areas. We use an intercity hedonic model to decompose wages into equilibrium and disequilibrium components. We then compare the separate influences of amenities and the disequilibrium component of wages on the distance moved between two metropolitan areas. Our findings indicate that both economic factors and amenity differentials are significant factors in explaining regional migration.     

Re(ge)ndering Gender(ed) Studies

McAuslan, Ian and Walcot, Peter (eds) Women in Antiquity Archer, Leonie J., Fischler, Susan and Wyke, Maria (eds) Women in Ancient Societies: ‘An Illusion of the Night’ Hawley, Richard and Levick, Barbara (eds) Women in Antiquity: New Assessments Richlin, Amy (ed.) Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome Sorkin Rabinowitz, Nancy and Richlin, Amy (eds) Feminist Theory and the Classics Reeder, Ellen D. Pandora: Women in Classical Greece     

Gendered Religions

Brooten, Bernadette Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism Cooper, Kate The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity Sawyer, Deborah F. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries     

Migration as an explanatory concept in paleolithic archaeology

Migration is frequently invoked as an explanation for pattern in paleolithic archaeology but the credibility of doing so depends almost exclusively upon acceptance of an analogy between historical process and the processes that have combined to create an ancient archaeological record. It is argued here that paleolithic archaeology cannot be treated as an extension of history and that historical processes are therefore inappropriate analogies for the site formation processes manifest in Upper Pleistocene archaeological contexts. The credibility accorded migration as an explanatory concept varies from one national or regional research tradition to the next. Why this should be so is examined in a discussion of the paradigm concept and how it affects construals of the nature and meaning of pattern.     

Identifying artificially deformed crania

In this paper we report on a new discriminant function for the identification of artificially deformed crania. Development of the function, based on a sample of deformed and undeformed crania from the Philippines, required visual classification of the sample into deformed and undeformed groups. Working from the observation that deformed crania display flattened frontal and occipital regions, the sample was seriated based on degree of flattening; classification was based on the results of this seriation. The discriminant function, calculated using curvature indices, required only six simple measurements: arc and chord measurements for the frontal (glabella to bregma), parietals (bregma to lambda) and occipital (lambda to opisthion). The function was designed to be conservative, in that a deformed cranium may be classified as undeformed, but the opposite should not occur. Our function classified the undeformed crania with 100% accuracy and deformed crania with 76.9% accuracy, for a total of 91.9% agreement with visual classification. In order to evaluate whether the function is applicable for samples from outside the Philippines, a double blind test was conducted with a large sample of deformed and undeformed crania from a broad geographical and temporal range. For this sample, the function agreed with visual classification in 89.7% of cases; 98.8% of undeformed crania were correctly classified, while deformed crania were identified with 73.7% accuracy. These results demonstrate the utility of the new discriminant function for the classification of artificially deformed crania from diverse contexts. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emulation and Empowerment: Material, Social, and Economic Dynamics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Virginia

The influence of emulative behavior on the material and socioeconomic transformations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world is widely debated. A study of historical archaeological sites and probate inventories in Virginia implicates emulation as one ethic operative in rural communities but also identifies a second dynamic: a tendency for many planters of divergent means to act in step with one another, responding in similar ways to new circumstances. Here termed a cultural accord, this affinity enabled some individuals who occupied middling social positions to use emulation advantageously in ways that less privileged members of the population could not.